Although many people take it for granted, teaching a person, especially a young child, to ride a two-wheeled bicycle can be very difficult. Young children lack the necessary coordination, balance and confidence to properly ride a bicycle.
Typically, young children first learn to ride three-wheeled tricycles or four-wheeled vehicles. These toys are relatively easy for young children to ride without any instruction because they have an adequate base which is difficult to over-balance or overturn. In order to ride these toys, the children simply sit in the seat and rotate the pedals without worrying about over-balancing themselves and falling. The children quickly gain confidence and master the intricacies, which although they may seem minor to adults, are monumental in young children's short development.
In order to ride a bicycle, however, the children must learn to naturally balance themselves as they pedal the bicycle without any means for supporting themselves. It will be appreciated that the pedaling action causes the children's center of balance to continuously shift, thereby causing the children to over-balance themselves and fall. It is only when the children learn to simultaneously control their balance and pedaling that they can ride a bicycle unaided and without some means for supporting themselves. In addition, the faster children learn to "self-right" their balance and control their balance, the faster they learn to ride a bicycle.
Two methods are typically used to teach children to properly balance themselves while riding a bicycle. First, the bicycle is provided with two training wheels located on each side of the rear wheel. Although this method has been used for years, it can be relatively ineffective because the children tend to "cheat" by riding on three wheels--the two bicycle wheels and one of the training wheels. The presence of the training wheels makes it relatively awkward and cumbersome to store or transport the bicycle. Not only are the training wheels difficult and time-consuming to assemble, but they are expensive to manufacture because they must be individually designed to fit bicycles of different sizes.
In the second method, the children pedal the bicycle pedals as the parent runs along the side of the bicycle, while holding the bicycle seat and essentially supporting the entire weight of the child and the bicycle. This teaching method also has disadvantages. First, it may take children a relatively lengthy time to learn to ride by themselves because parents tend to over-compensate by supporting too much of the children's weight, thereby preventing the children from learning to naturally control their balance and self-right themselves. In addition, parents may become fatigued from the constant exertion of bending down to hold the bicycle seat and running along the side of the bicycle for substantial distances. Thus parents may actually over-balance the children.